Bloc Party EP

Dim Mak; 2004

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I'll say this for Bloc Party: They know who Bertrand Russell is. He's quoted in their online bio: "Collective fear stimulates the herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd." The text proper unfolds in the utilitarian language of a socialist pamphlet. References to writers like J.G. Ballard and Richard Brautigan accrue like patches on an emo kid's hoodie. These guys have read some books, and aren't afraid to say so.

That said, it's surprising how little of their intellectual fodder has found its way into their discourse. If they've read Russell, they've probably read his pupil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would strongly disapprove of their dogmatic imprecision: In one illuminating incident, the ever-crotchety philosopher responded to a comment about the beauty of a particular tree by asking with irritation, "What do you mean by that?"

Bloc Party thinks that the trees are beautiful and society is screwed, but it's a bit unclear what they actually mean. The dominant paradigm hardly seems subverted by lines like, "We don't read the papers, we don't read the news/ Heaven's never enough, we will never be fooled." It's a little galling when namedrops outweigh insight in ostensibly political music, but hardly shocking. In an era when many think Che Guevara sang for Rage Against the Machine, you only have to mention the names of great thinkers to blow minds. Luckily, Bloc Party fare much better musically than they do rhetorically-- there's nothing ambiguous about their rollicking, poppy post-punk.

In terms of influences, one wants to say-- you're going to groan-- Gang of Four, The Fall, and Wire. I know, you're thinking: Do we really need any more post-punk fetishists? When they're this on point, yes. The best post-punk stems from the construction of a perfectly balanced machine, where manic energy, peristaltic rhythm, crisp shifts in intensity and tempo, and heartfelt sloganeering achieve a thrumming equilibrium. Bloc Party just fucking nail these precarious dynamics on what's shaping up to be the new-wave anthem of the year, "Banquet", which opens and closes this EP. The rigid, crashing drums, the dueling staccato guitars, the standard-bearing vocal volleys and strategically deployed "ah-ooh's" add up to a textbook Gang of Four fist-pumper. The "Banquet" remix boils the song down to drums, bass, squirrelly embellishments and ephemeral guitar gestures, creating an expansive echo chamber for the powerful vocal track. Hell of a set of pipes on that guy.

The nervy guitar spirals and call-and-response verses of "Staying Fat" are punctuated by Bloc Party's ace-in-the-hole: the soaring chorus, where the syncopated voices merge into towering, horizon-breaking harmonies. The cyclical, droning "She's Hearing Voices" was the British single, and it's a curious choice, since its churning atmosphere is the least poppy effort on the EP-- would it be asking you to swallow too much if I said it sounds like Isaac Brock jamming with TV on the Radio? Mark E. Smith might consider a plagiarism suit upon hearing "The Marshals are Dead", but would hopefully be too charmed by the strangely beautiful indie-prog of "The Answer" to follow through.

Bloc Party's politics may be a bit inchoate, but in this sort of music, shouting about a "new world order" is a familiar trope that's ultimately more palatable than the millionth pledge of apathy in an indie-rock song. If intellectual constructs must be reduced to genre signifiers, I suppose that calls for revolution are at least more invigorating than celebrations of indifference. In an era of moral relativism and political ambivalence, you have to give it to Bloc Party for singing like they mean it, even if they don't make explicitly clear what "it" is.